More Parasites

A well-known author friend of mine got a letter the other day from the vanity press Airleaf Publishing regarding one of his older titles, which he republished for free a few years back through the Authors Guild’s Back-in-Print program at iUniverse. I’ve omitted the name of the book and the author:

For over four years, Airleaf Publishing & Book Selling Services has blazed a ground-breaking trail selling independantly published books directly to bookstores […] We recently discovered your book XYZ and we believe it has the potential to be a national bestseller. Your book comes highly recommended and is precisely the kind of book we have had the most success selling. That is why we extend to you thiis special invitation. We want to include XYZ in an unprecedented national publicity program. As part of this program, we will:
1. Place your book in 15 retail bookstores.
2. Assign a full-time telemarketer for daily calls to stores to sell your book and set-up signings.
3. Recommend your book in person to decision-makers at five regional bookstore chains.
4. Place your book with 24 others on our unique campaign website
5. Place your book on the homepage of our retail store bookselling website
6. Place your book for sale on amazon and periodically on ebay.
7. Produce a 30 second television commercial to 630,000 views, 240 times.
8. Include your book in a full color glossy newspaper insert delivered to 200,000 subscribers.
9. Include your book in an email campaign to 500,000 book club members.
10. Broadcast two ten minute interviews on national syndicated AM/FM radio shows.
Our goal is to put XYZ in bookstores nationwide and make X a household name. While we have spent thousands, your cost to participate is only $7000!

It’s astonishing to me that there are people who will fall for this. It’s obvious that Airleaf didn’t do any real research into the author…or they would have discovered that he’s already very successful and well-known, and that the book they think has great potential was original published in 1990, in paperback in 1991, and was nominated for the equivalent of the Academy Award for excellence in its genre. Clearly, they are just trawling through the lists of iUniverse, PublishAmerica, and Authorhouse titles looking for suckers who still have some credit left on their Visa cards.

Let’s analyze their "incredible" offer, shall we?

1. Place your book in 15 retail bookstores.

Which stores? Where? Having one or two copies of your self-published
book in 15 stores out of the THOUSANDS of books stores nationwide isn’t
going to make you a bestselling author, a household name, or even earn
you any money…certainly not even a small percentage of your $7000.

2. Assign a full-time telemarketer for daily calls to stores to sell your book and set-up signings.

Oh, now there’s a recipe for success. What bookseller doesn’t look
forward to calls from vanity-press telemarketers flogging
dozens of unpublishable books?

3. Recommend your book in person to decision-makers at five regional bookstore chains.

See #2

4. Place your book with 24 others on our unique campaign website.

Take a look at the site. I would pay NOT to be on it. Beside its
cluttered, amateurish design, no effort is made whatsoever to actually
sell the books…they just slap the bookcovers up there with no tease
of any kind. In fact, here is an example of their listing for a typical
featured title: 

Jesus Christ and Martha, The Greatest Love Story
Bilingual: English And Spanish Edition

ISBN: 1-60002-114-X

Book Size: 6 x 9

Num. Pages:404

Author’s Bio: Luis A. Segura

Luis A. Segura was born in Bogota, Columbia, South America. Educated
in, Europe, South America, and in the United States. Loves romance,
poetry and the great mystery of the Jungle.

That’s it. That’s all there is. Pretty powerful sales effort, isn’t it?  This
is probably a good example of the salesmanship you can expect from their other  promotional
and sales efforts. The horrifying thing is that these suckers
paid $7000 for this.

To be fair, I looked at a couple of other titles and they had more substantial summaries …many of which were riddled with grammatical and typographical errors and question marks where commas and quotation marks were supposed to be. Here’s an example:

The year is 1971�and once again, OMNI�s top spy,
Lance Ryder, is called in by Commander Alex Power to investigate the
mysterious shooting death of a young military policeman, killed in Qui
Trang Province, South Viet Nam.

A lead takes Ryder into the upper regions of Thailand and Cambodia
where he quickly learns the young policeman�s life was a bizarre
twisted combination of drugs, membership in a smuggling ring, and an
unearthly fear of the ring�s leader.

Here’s another. It’s not riddled with errors. It’s just awful:

Love Undying represents poetry in such a way that
its author will become known the world over. Robanna Fason has created
a genre all its own. ‘Love Lyrics’ uses words to spread love to those
who need understanding the most. Robanna calls her collection Love Undying, and her audience calls her collection a miracle.

My guess is that the authors, not the promotional wizards at Airleaf, wrote these themselves, which would account for the formatting errors.

5. Place your book on the homepage of our retail store bookselling website.

See #4…only worse. But here’s another excerpt to amuse you from one of their book summaries:

Intermingled with
this tale of arrogance and greed are the affected blacks in Saint Kitts
and the Bahamas, as well as the dangerous mako sharks and friendly
dolphins that swim in their waters.

6. Place your book for sale on amazon and periodically on ebay.

Wow…they’ll put your book on amazon and ebay…and for only
$7000!!  You could do that for $5. ..but still, what an AMAZING
promotional idea.

7. Produce a 30 second television commercial to 630,000 viewers, 240 times.

If you happen to be watching public access cable channel 3….at 2 am, between infomercials. What they don’t say is that your title will be one of several in a pitch for their self-publishing program. Just look at the advertisement for yourself.

8. Include your book in a full color glossy newspaper insert delivered to 200,000 subscribers.

Uh-huh. What newspaper? My guess is that it isn’t the New York
Times. Or even the Calabasas Weekly Acorn. We’re probably talking
about some small-town grocery store throwaway…and even then, you will be lumped with
other dozens of other self-published titles and given the same powerfully
persuasive sales effort that Airleaf offers on their websites (see #4 & 5)

9. Include your book in an email campaign to 500,000 book club members.

Spam email from a self-publisher…backed with the same stunning
promotional prose we’ve come to expect from the Airleaf website and
bookstore (see #4 and 5). Now that’s a powerful sales tool. Oh, and hat’s the book club? My guess is it’s the prestigious Airleaf Club.

10. Broadcast two ten minute interviews on national syndicated AM/FM radio shows.

We aren’t talking Rush Limbaugh or Dr. Laura, folks. We’re talking,
most likely, the radio equivalent of paid infomericals. And you can
imagine the quality of the programs and the stations that air them. And
what time will these wonderful advertisements be aired? Probably at 2 a.m. when all those
buyers of self-published books are sitting by their radio.

UPDATE 11/25/2005: I’m not the only one talking about the Airleaf. So is Teresa Nielsen Hayden. She reported earlier this month that Airleaf is apparently the new incarnation of Bookman Marketing, which was notorious for preying on gullible aspiring writers. She offers some great advice and dissects some of the other "services" that Airleaf offers to the desperate and inept.